Abstract

The shape of biomolecules, such as proteins, may be represented
using different representations like space-fill, ballstick,
backbone, or secondary structures. The secondary
structure of proteins, comprising of sheet-like, helix-like and
loops structures, represent a higher level abstraction of its
structure. With ever increasing sizes of protein structure
data produced by high resolution x-ray crystallography and
cryo-electron microscopy, biologists often rely on visualizations
to better understand the overall structure of proteins.
In this paper, we present a unified framework for accelerating
the rendering of various representations of these structure
using GPUs. The framework first produces "impostor
primitives", which are simple linear element approximations
of quadric objects, such as spheres, cylinders, and helices.
Next, the rasterizations of the impostors are corrected to
produce pixel-precise renderings of the quadric objects. We
incorporate this framework into a bio-molecular visualization
tool proteinvis to demonstrate quantitative and qualitative
performance gains over earlier approaches for rendering
various representations of proteins.